Timeways

 If she could have waited, if she could have stopped

And seen what she was walking into

But that plate glass window

Of the future

Hit her square in the nose

She could see through it

But she could not touch the otherside

It was a bar to her outside world

And memory works like that

Memory of the event

Of the frame, the piece of time we call now

We say instant

But what is our concept of time  - but based on memory

And what is memory but an image, a sound or a smell

A taste, but what does it evoke

But a time,

So is time the conscious experience of the thing

Or the thing itself in space

And is time the bundle of emotions

Felt at her embrace

Or the unachievable other, the perfection in its place

Our idealized psychological conception

Of all the unrequited desires that we trace

Or our own projection of ourselves

Onto that other person's face

So what is time?

Why can the reality of now not be returned

Through some alchemy of science and art

To that sacred past

That hallowed space in youth

But it never can because in truth

Everything we have we lose

And yet light can travel at such a pace

That time seems not to pass through grace

And in this quantum intuition

Is where God and love can trace

And cross paths to weave a whirl wind

That connects beings across this great divide

So that feelings cannot hide

And all the martyrs who have died

Are reborn

And all the loves that ever danced at dawn

Are sworn again, not in vain

Nor in anguish or the pain of fear of loss

But to bear the cross

Of knowledge of this truth

As lightly as they bear the touch of rain

Upon their shoulders, on their roof

And in the soldier's heart

In the solders of the circuits of his brain

The electrons rearrange

And he sees her as if he always knew her

And always would in this way